The Trashpile Princess [Short Story: Part 2 of 2]

snowmachine (64)in #story • 7 years ago (edited)

I thought if I broke enough light bulbs Mom would stop calling me a spoiled bitch and pointing out the way I hid behind my hair, but it never worked, and I realized that that must have been the reason she started breaking – looking for love in the lacuna – and after that she never knew how to stop.

At night my childselves sleepwalked through the hallways looking for sore spots to kiss away with their busted lips and soft tongues. They were lost in the passageways of the labyrinth just as I had been, just I still am, lost in the interconnected halls and mirrors and morphine staircases looking for the way out. My childselves had no string to follow out, to escape into the cool air. I thought if I just had one moment outside of these walls I’d be able to breathe.

A few weeks afterwards I saw her in the stairwell at school, leaning against the wall, chewing gum with a stare that could operate on sharks. When I passed by she touched my hand and smiled.

“Cutie,” she said, the tone of her voice almost sinister, or did I only imagine those sharpened, cracked edges?
I lowered my head and kept walking.

In biology class my lab partner bent back her fingers until they popped and asked me if I thought chocolate (sometimes) tasted better at sunset, but I never answered, transfixed by Katie on the other side of the table, tracing a silver pin across her knuckles and blue-veined hands, over and over and over again until I felt the patterns making crease marks against my own skin. I put my hands in my lap and squeezed them into fists, unrolled my shirtsleeves when goosebumps began to crawl.

I shouldn’t have let her shown me the shortcut home.

She caught me before I got to the bus stop and grabbed my elbow. “Hey cutie,” she said, “You live near Terrace, right? There’s a faster way to get home, I’ll show you.” She had gloves on in the November cold, and I shivered when the leather touched my bare skin. She took me away from the bus stop, around the side of the school, where the White Woods waited behind barbed wire, the trees enmeshing themselves in dark supernatural undercurrents, like a dream you once had, as if I could just sink elbow deep into their murk and find a more comfortable place to live. Katie smiled and touched my cheek and said, “Let’s go. Come on, it’ll be an adventure. Didn’t you ever play like knights when you were littler?”

I couldn’t tell her I never found that type of fantasy comforting, or that I’d spent most of my childhood looking through the corridors for Theseus’ ball of string. Yet when I felt her gloved hand against my cheek I almost thought those love stories that took place in the back of vaudeville theatres and the velvet-lined tongues of stage coaches and deep faery forest glades could be true from the right angles. No matter how wrong I am. No matter how wrong they are.

She pulled the barbwire strands apart so I could crawl though, guiding my head so the cool pointed barbs would not get caught in my hair. She brushed her hand against mine when she caught me staring at her and I had to look away, and soon the trees swallowed the chimneyhead of the school building and the sky became wrapped in a sticky copse.

And she told me not to look away.
When the cool metal touched my neck I thought, at first, of her fingers, with their ice veins like Celtic designs, but when she brushed her lips against my ear and whispered, “You’re going to do everything I tell you,” I realized it must be something more sinister.
I laughed nervously. “Are you joking?”
“could kill you right now,” she said, and her voice froze me, “Slice into those little veins. Don’t you believe me, cutie?”
I said nothing. My limbs became soft, as if they might wither away or collapse into dust and dandelions. My backpack fell to the floor. She squeezed my throat and pushed me up against a tree so that my shirt snagged and the bark created wound patterns against my vertebrate.
“Don't look away,” she said, “Look into my eyes.”
I bit my lip. Her little knife pressed harder, threatening to split my artery in two.
“Look,” she said, “Look at me. I want you to. Look at me.”
I looked into Katie’s eyes, shivering, but I did not break. They were blue. They were almost beautiful.
“That wasn’t so hard, cutie,” she whispered, tracing lines in my skin with her knife, “Was that so hard?”

I said nothing.

“Now get on your knees.”

What happened next only reached me in half-moments, her voice subtle, soft yet urgent, like tarantella and whipped cream. The knife made letters against my cheek, dancing yet never slicing, and when she told me to pull down her panties all the edges became dark. I whimpered in my throat. Katie told me, “You belong to me now,” and I couldn’t deny her, especially when my face became numb and sunk and a bloom of red blood dripped on her shoes, spreading like a flower. She whispered directions. I crumbled, took her in my mouth, tasted her insides while something in me broke, something important, the gate holding back that dark, dark water, keeping ruins from overtaking you. Katie gripped my hair and I choked while the back of my neck throbbed, as if I’d been stung by bees.

“Nobody will believe you,” she told me afterwards as I knelt in the dirt and leaves with her taste on my tongue and tantric prayers in the back of my head, everything muddled, black tea-leaf compressed. “Nobody will believe a girl’s that wrong.” She kissed me. Then she told me she loved me.

And I didn’t hate her. I just hated myself.

The day I learned Katie stuck her dad's sawed off underneath her chin and squeezed the trigger with her toe, I skipped school and just kept on walking. I climbed over a fence and disappeared from the sightline of traffic and passerbys, lay down in a patch of sunlight and felt warmth dance over my eyelids, my shoulders, scissored wings. My heart did not remember the way she pressed the knife against my pulse, but beat in gentle rhythm, so that for a moment, a moment, I believed it could be bright red paper living warm inside of me. It began to rain, then thunder, and soon my whole world turned gray. A Sunday school teacher once told me God was in the rain. I tried to taste him, stuck my tongue out and let the drops splash against my lips, but it only seemed like water. Only like rain.

Perhaps God lived in the labyrinth, his hands pressed up against the other side of the wall, his cold breath visible on the stone. Or maybe he traveled through machine gun fire, torn mortar, corpses like twisted metal.

I got up and kept walking. I climbed underneath barbed wire though she was not there to keep my head safe and visited that place where she broke me, where her kiss stuck on my lips even after multiple showers, and even know I could feel it humming on my lips. I thought about crying but the rain took off my face.

When I got home Mom found me on the couch in all my wet clothes.

“’You're ruining the fabric,” she said, “Where have you been? School got out two hours ago.”
“I didn’t go,” I said softly.
“You didn’t go?”
“No.”

Her lips always twisted when she got angry.
“A friend died today,” I said, “she killed herself.”
“You just skipped school? You think you can just do whatever you want? We paid good money to get you a good education…”
But I wasn’t listening.
“Take off those wet clothes,” she said, and then, “you spoiled bitch.”

She grabbed my elbow and jerked me off the couch, tried to hurt me with hard edges, but all her layers were gone, stripped and peeled away, and I saw the pink softness underneath, the way it cracked. I knew she couldn’t hurt me anymore, not like I’d been hurt, and I laughed softly. My head floated above my shoulders with dripping hair and when she slapped me across my face and my nose began to bleed I laughed again.

“What's so funny?” she asked me, “What’s so funny?”
“Momma,” I said, “I’m in love with this girl and she died today, and I realized everything’s going to be okay, even when I don’t think it is, because nothing you or anyone do can take me away from myself. You know?”
She released my arm and I stumbled back.
“Take those wet clothes off,” she said.

The truth is that Theseus is long dead and he’s taken his ball of thread with him. I’m living in these labyrinthine walls with a monster, but it’s okay.

In my room I peeled off my wet clothes and lay back on my bed in my undergarments, closed my eyes and listened to the thunder just outside of the window. I gave up Katie, and slowly, shivering, spread my arms out like wings.